Who Needs the Family

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WORKING class women are oppressed as women and as workers. But women's oppression at work isn't identical to men's. Women tend to do jobs which are like the jobs we do at home, looking after people, cooking, cleaning and servicing men.

These jobs are low paid, and sometimes part time because the woman has to run a family as well is go to work. The trade unions don't take women's jobs seriously enough. Most of them accept that part-time jobs go first when it comes to redundancies. Most don'teven try to get these women fully involved in union branches YTS Cheap THE scrap heap - that's what the Tories are offering workers today. The scrapheap straight from school or one year on after a spell on a YTS.

While youth unemployment soars, youth wages drop. And the unions aren't doing much about it.

Some of them are sitting pretty and even going along with the Tory lie that youth have priced themselves out of a job.

The unemployed must unite with workers in trade unions to stop anymore redundancies and closures. The unemployed are an army of cheap labour for the and union campaigns.

You can see that by looking at the number of women in leading positions in the unions - very few indeed. It's only recently that trade unions have cottoned on to the idea that sexual harassment at work is an issue they should be taking up.

Women are brought up differently to boys. We are taught to be passive, caring, quiet and to accept our lot. We are not expected to be sexually active; if we are then we're slags. if we're not then we're 'tight. "You can't win either way. And it's like that all the time. If a woman is labour bosses and now we've got to become an army of activists fighting for the right to work. Arguing with workers that they must fight to keep jobs, going round picket lines giving our support.

Unemployed people should be joining trade unions and demanding that the whole union fights for us, for jobs, and for higher benefits without harassment fram the press.

Unemployed people must organise. Take over the unemployed centres, stop them being run by bureaucrats as 5th rate leisure centres and start using them as places to co-ordinate the unemployed's fightback. successful on TV, for instance, like the presenters of TV am are, then the rest of the media doesn't want to know if they're any good but go on about their bodies and private lives instead.

Very few parts of the media, very few school courses, very few employers and unfortunately a few more labour movement activists see women as anything other than sex objects or mothers and wives Capitalism in Britain is managed around the family. The ideas of how women should be are to do with the role we play in the family. The welfare state. along with the rest of society. don't see us as properly independent but as part of a family. So our needs, like to housing, supplementary benefit in our own right, good wages and even the right to work are neatly side-stepped: after all we are supposed to be dependent on a man. A socialist society won't be organised around the family, everyone will be treated as equals. There would be public facilities available like cheap launderettes, cheap • restaurants, and good creches which would relieve the drudgery of housework.

But you can:t just tell women to wait for socialism. Women are organising now and demanding that the labour movement fights for our needs as women and as women workers. We have a special oppression in some ways its different to men's so don't ignore us, fight for women's rights! 22:0 m POLICE